The one I see most often is in downtown Nelson, right beside the entrance to the parking lot that I use most often when I am in town. It is very noticeable, a tall glass and aluminum box with a big Telecom logo on the glass and a sign saying "Free WiFi Hotspot". Hard to miss that one. I also see a free Telecom WiFi network available on my phone when I am in Richmond, though I could not tell you if there is a phone box anywhere near. I never set out to look for any.

As someone who lives in NZ, I assure you there are Telecom phonebooths in lots of places. You may have not been looking carefully enough to see them.

And, also, they would be mainly in urban centers. Arrowtown is not an urban center, though it is a popular holiday spot. Much of NZ is very rural with small communities and they may have never had a booth.

It has been my thought that Telecom embarked on this program to cater to the tourists who come every summer.

No need to sympathize with Telecom. They are THE phone company in NZ, not just the payphone network. Telecom has most of the landline, mobile, and broadband business in NZ, and own the wires they lease to most of the other providers. So, they are not hurting over the demise of payphones.

The Telecom WiFi hotspots have been set up around NZ for a couple of years now. I guess it was a trial. Where I live in Nelson, there are at least two that I encounter often. They work, and they are free to everyone. I have used them several times when out shopping or getting a coffee. And I am not a Telecom customer.

I think the original poster you have responded to meant "past", not "passed" as he said. That changes the meaning of what he said to you, and makes your comment kind of pointless.

Yup, what you say is quite true about the CDC 6500. I was at the University of Texas in 1966 when they received #13 CDC 6600. There was a bank of 12 x 12 switches in which the ultimate boot program was encoded. Typically they caused a read to be initiated at location 0 of the hard disk, and thus loaded in the rest of the boot sequence. In its day, it was the be-all end-all supercomputer with a 1 microsecond cycle time.

My thesis work, computing a potential energy curve for a diatomic molecule took 8 solid hours of computing on the 6600 for each plotted point. I don't know what it would have taken on the machine we had before. I was the night operators' friend. They started my runs at the beginning of their shift, and had nothing to do until morning.

I wonder the same, but then I seem to be quite a different consumer than those who post here. I don't play games. I don't download music. If I want to watch a movie, I go to the cinema and enjoy sitting in the dark while eating popcorn. I watch TV shows on the "gasp" TV from my satellite service. I spend 4 - 6 hours every day on the internet, mainly following news items (a lot on /.) I watch videos associated with those news items when I want. Sometimes my wife watches the same videos, which costs the data transfer again. I do automatic backup of both computers to the cloud. And all my landline phone usage is VOIP. I use about 25GB per month.

Streaming video services are just almost beginning to be available in NZ.

Here in NZ, we have limited choices I guess. There are quite a few ISPs, but they generally are reselling DSL services on lines owned by the telco. My speeds are ~12 Mbps down, ~1Mbps up. Almost all providers have data caps, either going to dialup speed or $$ extra when the cap is exceeded. I chose one that had no data allowance at all. I much preferred just paying for what I used at NZ$1/GB plus a base monthly charge. I am quite happy with that.

I had the privilege of meeting Capt Hopper (she was not Adm. yet) many years ago. She was a real dynamo, enjoying her life and very turned on about what she was doing. Everyone would be well to have someone encourage them into a lifetime activity that would give them such enjoyment as she had!

I cannot actually say whether she was a really good developer or not. Much of the accolades she got were because she was the first to do a number of things, not necessarily because she was the "best" in some sense.

Is there an evolution of the American English language going on of which I have not been aware? In this series of comments, I have seen many, many instances of the use of "breaks" when "brakes" is intended. It is mind-boggling that people who seem to be very competent in the language otherwise will then dip into this aberration.

Hear! Hear! You got that right.

Might be very effective, however.

Hey! That is rude! Gasoline was 20 cents a gallon when I was a teen.

Driving is not much "fun" any more for me.

Since NZ has no written constitution, or supreme law, those freedoms that make NZ one of the freest countries are established by legislation. Parliament can eliminate them at will if they wanted to.

When I first looked at the infographic on the referenced blog, I misread the label for California to be "Socialistan", thinking it to be a comment on the liberalism of the place. Later I realized it said "Socalistan", referring to the locale of the center of influence. I wonder if anyone else did the same.

I am surprised that "Socalistan" showed such localized connections on the map. Since so very many people in California are from outside California originally I would have thought there would be really strong connections to "back home".

I think you got that right! BART has been in the works since the 1970s, and still has not reached San Jose. Santa Clara Valley has a light-rail system that was all implemented within the time that BART was "underway". I used to ride it from San Jose to Mountain View when my car had to go into the shop or something. It worked OK, but took an hour and a half for that ride, which is kind of a long time.

Not working in the city does not make them "part-time residents". Their property taxes are levied the same as their neighbor who works downtown.